


Crocus

by OwlBird



Series: The War is Over Now - I Don't Recall Who Won It [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 02:56:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10067333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwlBird/pseuds/OwlBird
Summary: A look at how it might feel when even kindness cannot cure sorrow.





	

The maesters say that heartache is only in the mind, and it's true that its terrible noise seems to ring silent to all the world but you. But then, how can it still  feel so much - like a physical crack; like a whole complicated bulk splitting and tearing itself apart?

The thought leads her past the snow-borne pools and to a fallen tree, whose decay moss has covered tenderly with a soft green blanket. Accepting the invitation, she sits.

It is also true, she concedes, that the deep and sounding faults inside her now did not come from a direct assault. Jon is not such a person - could never be that sort of person, and does not deserve any such accusation. It is, she thinks, over time, the way he showed it in the things he did _not_ do. Not because he is dis-honorable - no, Gods, no - but because honor does not always extend to love, and honor cannot be expected to dream in the same way or know the same things as love does.

She frowns, toeing the melting dirt with her boot. In so many ways, such pain is so foolish: it comes from negation, things that do _not_ happen, crimes and virtues that go uncommitted; an ache that derive its power from emptiness.

Yet she, the least of her siblings, found the old maxim true for her most of all: hope is the last thing to die. And she had hoped (and if she is honest with herself - still hoped, foolishly, after all these years - will likely always hope), that something would still from from the nothing. That Jon might _see_ her.

Her. Her soul. Sansa feels oddly protective of her soul, in the way an inadequate guardian might still want to protect a promising young ward. And yet in housing it, she has contaminated it, degrades it, drags it down. She does not mean too; it cannot be helped. She knows her mortal heart cannot cure her soul's sorrow, so she gives it as much of her heart to bruise as she can, in penance.

A flash of green catches her eye. She squats down (most unladylike, she admonishes herself, despite everything). It's a crocus, pushing itself patiently and defiantly up through the cold hard earth.

Sansa's throat clenches. Her soul, her lovely beautiful soul that she does not deserve. It is made of the same thing as the crocus and the eternal, unneeding, undirected stuff of the universe: love. She knows she'd not be believed - understandable, after all the horrors the universe has inflicted on Westeros. But inexplicably, all the things she has seen have convinced Sansa of the opposite.

The maesters would tell her it's a woman's sickness or fancy, but she _knows_. She _feels_ it, the fiber of love, in every tree, and animal, and sees the soul in every body, giving every living thing a state of grace no one, nothing, can take away.

She stares at the crocus, patient, defiant; part of the endless living universe. She wishes she could explain it to Jon in a way he would understand.

But now the sun has set, the mist of almost-evening pales the sky, and the melting pools are frozen again. She knows it’s time to return, and that staying would only cause unnecessary alarm, even though her body, her mind, her heart quail at returning. At returning to Jon, her kind and dutiful husband whom she could not tell because he would ask "what can I do?" and how to explain something that cannot be answered if it is not understood? 

  
Still, after a moment's pause, Sansa dusts the dirt off her skirts, furls her endless and enduring spirit close and neatly into her loving embrace, and begins the walk back to the lights of Winterfell.

_______________________

The songs that come after sing of Jon, who was a good kind, a grand king, a legendary king. The songs that come after tell of Sansa, a good queen, a beautiful queen, a dutiful queen. They count no words, of course, to the ache of her spirit, or to her hope, which never died. 

_______________________

Years after Sansa was buried, a crocus bloomed near the bones. It was a bright fresh green thing, and it was not burdened by anything but the sheer joy of living.


End file.
